The Winner Alone
by BurningMockingjay
Summary: Cloves wins the Hunger Games without Cato.


_I am the victor of the Seventy-fourth Hunger Games. And Cato is dead. _As I was loaded into the hovercraft, taken away from the arena, those were the two thoughts that were on endless replay in my mind. It was like I thought that the more I repeated those phrases over and over again in my head, the more it would become real. But it didn't.

In my mind, I was still in the arena, Cato was still beside me, we were back in the forest hunting District 12. We weren't though. We weren't. I was here. He was gone. I paused. That couldn't be right, could it? He wasn't dead, was he? I wasn't really the winner alone, was I? We were winners together, weren't we? I wasn't alone. I couldn't be alone. He couldn't have left me alone.

My brain filed through the previous events. In my head, it seemed like everything had happened all at once. But I knew that it must have happened over a span of some time. We were hunting 12. I had come across Lover Boy first, found him, knocked him down with one swiftly delivered kick to his left leg.

But as I'd raised my knife, I'd paused. A look had flashed across his face then. Fear. Not for himself, but for her. Katniss. He knew he was going to die, but he was still worrying about her and her safety. And for just a second, I sympathized with him. Lover Boy, saw the opening I was giving him, and opened his mouth to yell, but before he could say a word, he was dead.

His cannon fired, immediately followed by another. Cato. That was the first thought that crossed my mind. Then I was running, as fast I as I could to the spot where I'd heard the cannon, near the river. Red hair was the first thing I saw. Five. She could have been sleeping, but for the fact that her eyes were open.

Red juice from the berries she'd crushed in her hands had leaked onto the ground that she was lying on. One left. Katniss. I walked through the forest, silently, my feet not making a sound on the ground. And then I came upon them.

This is the part where my memory and my mind refuse to agree. What happened in my memory is I came into the clearing to find Cato and Katniss. Cato was on the ground, with one of her silver tipped arrows in his chest. Katniss stood over him, a grim expression on her face. As she whipped around to face me, I threw the three remaining knives I had left, watched as they connected with her heart.

The thoughts I had had previously, of torturing her slowly, vanished from my mind. By that time, I wasn't even looking at her anymore. And then I was kneeling next to him. I was afraid, a rare emotion, for me. I tried to form some sort of coherent sentence in my mind, something to say, but I couldn't. "Cato", I whispered. "Please. Please don't leave me". He smiled, faintly, at me.

"I was never very good at following your orders", he managed, as he reached up to touch my face. I felt the overwhelming need to say everything that was rushing through my mind. But any words that I tried to make myself say, wouldn't come out. So instead, I kissed him then, lightly, softly, and when I pulled back the cannon fired. "I love you".

My voice rang out in the forest, even though I knew he wouldn't ever hear it. It came upon me then that I was the only living human left in the arena. I was the victor. That's where my memory ends and my mind tries to rationalize the previous events. Because nothing I remembered could be true.

_Cato is dead. And I am the victor of the 74th Hunger Games. _

At some point, I'm aware of being scrubbed down, of the cuts and injuries I've sustained being treated and concealed. Of being shoved into a dress I don't want to wear. Of being made up to look like a tiny porcelain doll. I turn to look in the mirror. I don't recognize myself. Not because of makeup or a dress or anything my stylists have done. Because of my eyes.

The hunted look of before is gone. Any look at all is gone from them. The previous spark, the very aliveness that shines through from people's eyes is dissipated from mine. And I look like someone who would rather be dead than alive. Would I? For so long, winning seemed like the only thing that mattered. Staying alive.

That's what the Careers trained for, thats what they were told to achieve. This was what I'd wanted for so long. To escape, to be free, to make my own life. But was this what my life was going to be like from now on?

I was paraded around the stage, plunked down in a chair, and watched it all over again. The images that they broadcast on the screen don't seem any more real than my memory though. I watch as Glimmer and Four are killed by the tracker jackers. I watch as Katniss kills Marvel. I watch as my skull is almost shattered by Thresh. And I relive my final day in the arena.

When it's all over, Caesar Flickerman attempts to interview me, but I say close to nothing. President Snow congratulates me. I see the audience's reaction to me. I know that I act nothing like the previous Career victors. I'm not laughing or smiling or boasting. But what was there to be happy about?

Eventually I'm put back on a train to District 2. I look out the window, at the Capitol growing smaller in the distance. Suddenly, the arena and everything that transpired there, feels so far away. Like it happened to someone else. Like I was just another one of the thousands of viewers who had watched the girl from District 2 fall in love with her district partner and become victor.

Suddenly I'm so scared that everything will fade, that when I look back on the arena, on Cato, I'll feel nothing. That the pain of everything will stay locked away for so long that it'll become a distant memory, something to remember in a vague sort of way.

So I make myself say it aloud, if only to feel something, to force myself out of the numb state I've fallen into. "Cato is dead. And I am the victor of the 74th Hunger Games". And for the first time in a long time, I feel tears burn in my eyes.


End file.
